On Creating Meaningful Art

ed concepts, and by the time the Renaissance came along, art referred to “any physical or mental activity, so far as it [was] practically exhibited; i.e., a profession, art (music, poetry, medicine, etc.)”10 Further designations based on these Roman notions eventually created the categories of liberal arts and servile arts —the arts of free men and the arts of slaves or the lower class. Since distinctions between the nuanced ideas contained within the meaning of the word arts had been developing in various forms since the classical epoch, it should not come as any surprise that further distinctions were made along the way, particularly at crucial periods within the evolution of human thought, like that of the Enlightenment, when the epistemological category of aesthetics came into proper use. On this point, Roger Scruton aptly notes,

It is true that the word ‘aesthetic’ came into its present use in the eighteenth century; but its purpose was to denote a human universal. The questions I have been discussing in this book were discussed in other terms [e.g. art, beauty] by Plato and Aristotle, by the Sanskrit writer Bharata two centuries later, by Confucius in the Analects and by a long tradition of Christian thinkers from Augustine and Boethius, through Aquinas to the present day.11

Scruton makes his observation in the context of his explaining the development of aesthetics as a discipline, par - ticularly where a distinction is drawn between Kant’s idea of universal taste in the judgment of natural beauty and the aesthetic judgment of art as works of man which “interest us in part because they represent things, tell stories about things, express ideas and emotions, convey meanings that are consciously intended.”12 Really, Scruton’s is a simplified culmination of “the difficult, often flamboyant, argumentation” about the ideas of aesthetics called by different names beginning with Plato (who dismissed any real value of art as mere imitations of imitations of truth) and Aristotle (who defended the arts, e.g., poetry as being more valuable than history because it reveals truths universally relevant to humanity).

10 Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great books of the Western World: Plato , vol. 7, 74.

11 Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction , 54.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, even though the ideas had been being argued for two millennia, “The philosophical discipline of aesthetics did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it in his Halle master’s thesis to mean epistêmê aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and imagined (Baumgarten, Meditationes §CXVI, pp. 86–7).”13 This being the case, the use of the term fine arts as it is relates to aesthetics seems to come into use in the same early modern period. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary dates its introduction to the early eighteenth century (e.g., 1739). This same reference defines the fine arts as “(1) art (as painting, sculpture, or music) concerned pri-

12 Scruton, Beauty , 54.

13 Paul Guyer, “18th Century German Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 16, 2007, accessed June 16, 2017, https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/.